Oil Lobby Photo Altered To Present Racially Diverse Image

It looks like the oil lobby's bamboozlement habit is so ingrained that it extends even to cosmetic touches.

The website Astrotruth.org notes that an American Petroleum Institute pamphlet given out at a forum last week appears to show oil and gas industry employees as a racially diverse group of people.

Check it out:

But two of those people aren't what they seem. This stock photo shows the same group, but two men who appear as dark-skinned and Asian in the API pamphlet are white in the stock photo. (Check out the men who are third from the left, and second from the right, in the front row.)

API -- or whoever prepared the pamphlet on its behalf -- downloaded the stock photo, then altered the heads of two white men to make them appear non-white, it appears.

But they did a pretty shoddy job. Astrotruth noticed the maneuver because it looks like API forgot to change the dark-skinned man's hand, which remains white.

API has been in the news lately for organizing astroturf rallies to fight efforts to address global warming, and for teaming up with Newsweek to host panel discussions on energy policy, featuring CEO Jack Gerard.

Late Update: Alert reader R.B.W. writes:

Go look at the stock photo again. The two men who are now Asian and black are the same man in the photo twice. Even the stock photo is doctored.